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It soon becomes clear that the focus of the work is
not on acheiving any particular musical moment, but on
the ephemerality of sonic transformation itself.
Unlike compositions that utilize radio in part for its
referential or signifying qualities, SWR is more in
the minimalist tradition of relying on the primacy of
the material itself. The work is a celebration of the
radio as material and of the belief that minutiae and
limited systems can yield rich results. But it is also
a celebration of the rich, ragged, unstable thickness
of analog sound in a world anesthetized by the crisp
and clean precision of digital audio.

— Lou Mallozzi, P-Form Magazine

Nagual documents a 2004 live performance in Hartford, Connecticut
where the shortwave radio manipulations of longstanding collaborators
Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan were joined by Aidan Baker's guitar,
melding smoothly to create several lengthy tracks of austere but
optimistic drone.

Instead of the rapid wow and flutter and twitchy bursts of speech
often teased from shortwave radios, Merrell and Jordan work in more
abstract terms, processing the signal into distant electromagnetic
roaring and slowly drifting whistles. Merrell's 2006 album Neptune
featured tracks inspired by the planet's huge, frozen moons and
there's a similar sense of the sublime evoked here. Like optical
illusions which exploit the brain's perception of negative space,
Nagual suggests being confronted with something too large and
mysterious to be resolved into either cavernous space or supermassive
presence. This is especially noticeable on the first track,
"Undertow", which starts from a muffled loop like thunder heard from
the ocean bed before moving with a graceful but unstoppable tidal
power through a variety of slowly pulsating phrases.

Avoiding the danger of dominating the trio, Baker's guitar stays
mellow and subtle, restraining melodic input to loops of clean,
rippling tones. "Diomedea" sets up a gentle sea-saw of octaves which
are gradually subsumed by Merrell and Jordan's drifts of
indecipherable chatter and harsh solar winds. "Cygnus" may feature a
more active, undulating guitar line, but only as a foil to his
companions' invasive, ringing frequencies, reflecting the level of
sympathy and vision in this collaboration.

— Abi Bliss, The Wire, February, 2008

The beautiful photographs — a forest and an amass of superb
clouds — that adorn the cover of Nagual give only a faint idea
of its musical content. Looking at the instrumentation (shortwave
radio, guitars, electronics, processing) and remembering the ambits
in which these artists have worked, we realize in advance that an
experience of altered perception will be likely met. The four tracks
— recorded live in Hartford, Connecticut in 2004 — are
presented as a single unit, a 60-minute suite that easily reaches
the highest positions in my personal space/ambient rank of the last
five years. The feel of proximity given by the ethereal qualities of
Bakers loops, the otherworldly voices and the modified emissions
coming from Merrell and Jordan's radios generate a state of perennial
floating that, for a change, doesnt sound like refined new age.
Depths similar to the ones reached by the best Lustmord are
observed, segments of gentle guitar arpeggios and powerful tempests
of indefinite aural matter representing a stimulation for the being
to remain awake, all the more in those moments when the tiredness of
living amidst stupidity starts knocking at the door of our mind. The
beginning of Cygnus is just memorable in its simplicity, a graceful
line repeated over and over by Baker upon a fairly static background
whose sonic appearance resembles a cross between the slow breathing
of a whale and an aircraft taking off, before wailing moans by
bionic mermaids define the evolution of the piece towards
completion. If this cynical grumbler liked this one so much, then
lovers of the genre should consider Nagual a must.

— Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, February, 2008

Not sure who Todd Merrell or Patrick Jordan are, but we sure as heck
are familiar with the third part of this drone trio, the Baker in
question is none other than Mr. Aidan Baker, he of Nadja, Arc, and a
million or so releases under his own name.

This live set finds Baker handling guitar duties, but you'd never know
it from the sound, augmented by short wave radios, electronics, and
various bits of processing, the sound here is deep and dark, a
crumbling and epic expanse of rumbling shimmering low end. Roiling
clouds of murky melodic fragments, distant swells, throbbing low end
pulses, barely audible bits of static and washed out glitch. Very
cinematic, if you were watching a film that was almost entirely dark,
with just barely visible shifts in the various shades of black and
grey. Lovely though, minimal and haunting. Think Coleclough, Chalk,
Lustmord, that sort of ambient darkness.

But the second track is an entirely different beast. Simple guitar
strums, minimal melodies, the strings struck softly, the metallic buzz
and clang ringing out into the ether, some sort of underwater slow
motion Fahey, smeared and soft and dark and dreamy. The final half of
the track, the guitar disappears completely, leaving streaks of
feedback that sound like the cries of gulls, grinding slow motion
slabs of shifting low end, whirling windlike whirs, almost like a
manufactured nature recording.

The guitar returns for the third track, drifting gently, while the
background noise builds into a slow motion wash of sound, the track
culminating in a cloud of chimes and reverbed percussion, seasick
swirls and struck steel strings, before slipping languidly into the
final track, a lugubrious underwater crawl, all of the sounds muddy
and indistinct, a sonar like ping buried way down in the mix,
underneath it all a thick blanket of constant whirring drones, quite
lovely.

Taken from a live recording in 2004, Nagual features three artists
known for their individual work — Todd Merrell on electronics,
Aidan Baker on guitar and Patrick Jordan on 'processing,' with
Jordan and Merrell also working shortwave radio — in an
enjoyable collaboration. As is always the case with improvisation,
the performance runs a risk of simply being indulgent rather than
truly memorable, but in its understated fashion the four pieces
featured here show that the three performers are able to combine
forces well. The overall feeling is unsurprisingly one of sheer
meditative chill, often being the kind of dark, reflective
electronic pieces that call to mind everyone from Mick Harris to
Robert Rich at the latter's most moody, with Baker's guitar work
providing anchoring undertones and shades to the slightly stern mood
conjured up by Merrell and Jordan. The opening "Undertow" is well
named as a result, suggesting a dark pull downward throughout in its
slowly rising flow of sound and echo. This said, not all is gloom by
any means — "Diomedea" is much more enclosed and cocoonlike,
with Baker's guitar parts being gentle additions to a carefully
building wash of warm sound that understatedly rhythmic as well as
softly calming, a fine contrast to its concluding section where
colder sonic winds sound like they're coming down from outer space.
"Cygnus" blends these two impulses more carefully, Baker's soft
melody providing a steady core for a series of interwoven drones
that almost glow with lambent energy, serene and uplifting. [3.5
stars]

— Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

Like Tod Dockstader, Connecticut-based Todd Merrell is a sound
explorer who has been processing radio frequencies and spectral
communications from shortwave radios and transforming them into
soundscapes since 1978. Neptune was recorded in real time with no
overdubs and no post-production in two-track, direct to DAT with
Merrell using only a single band shortwave receiver, a loop sampler,
delay and reverb effects processor and mixer. Each of the eight tracks
are devoted to one of Neptune's 13 moons (the five most recently
discovered have yet to be named). While the eighth planet from the Sun
is one of the gaseous planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus), whose
composition is made up of ice, rock, helium and hydrogen, and whose
winds reach up to 200 kms/hr, astronomers know little about these
moons. This leaves the door wide open for Merrell to imagine what the
sounds on and surrounding these moons would be. Too often when the
solar system is evoked in music, it is often depicted in
quasi-mystical terms with the music falling into cliched
psychedelia. Merrell avoids this pitfall and wisely assumes that the
moons have some of the same characteristics of their parent planet. So
that while Merrell's immersive drone-based soundscapes are definitely
celestial, they are equally forbidding; gaseous in shape with a
temperature that is glacially cold and an omnisciently thick,
turbulent, distant roar, something like being trapped in one of
Neptune's howling wind storms. Sometimes this ghostly audio manifests
as a massive, swirling echo chamber as on "Thalassa" and "Larissa" or
a gigantic bass tone on "Galatea" or more benignly as on the piercing,
ringing loops of "Naiad" and "Despina". Only "Proteus" and "Nereid"
break from the template, the former dominated by a granular buzzing
static that comes close to Francisco Lopez's abrasive fissures of
sound, the latter employing the microtonal static as a broken rhythm
to the companion staccato overtones, as if the Raster-Noton camp had
decided to embrace the dark ambience of Robert Rich. Of course, if
your source material is radiophonic transmissions, you're bound to
tune into some human voices and on "Neptune" they come in two forms,
either as barely perceptible echoing voices struggling to be heard
amidst the murky waveforms on "Thalassa" or as a washed out angelic
choir that forms the basis for "Triton". This, despite the fact, that
humanity's first up close contact with Neptune was through the photos
relayed by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. Neptune is a compelling
and occasionally harrowing celebration of this distant blue-colored
orb.

— Richard Moule, Signal To Noise, Winter, 2007

As befitting an album named after a distant planet and with its
individual tracks named after said planet's moons, Neptune begins
with a dark, evocative chill very much in keeping with many of the
best practitioners of the danker side of ambience — this isn't
so much a healing wash of sound as a sense of desolate, empty
landscapes under a coal-black sky. But "Naiad" isn't the album in
miniature, as Todd Merrell explores various shades of murk and
disorienting gloom throughout the album. Rather than being entirely
calm to the point of death, activity crops up in careful ways
— the seemingly random, heavily echoed blips and burps on
"Galatea" set against the absolute zero of the background wash, the
slow, steady rhythm of "Triton," feeling like an endless, regular
but syncopated pulse through gauze. Some pieces definitely have the
feeling of alien broadcasts — consider the distorted, bubbling
flow of what sounds like language of some form or another on
"Thalassa," rising out of infinite depths (all the more appropriate
given the nautical imagery applied to the planet and its moons). The
concluding "Nereid" provides a fine counterbalance to the opening
"Naiad," sounding even more like a Thomas Koner piece lost somewhere
in the outer cosmos — further living up to the inspiration for
the album as a whole. [3.5 stars]

— Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

Admittedly, there are more than a handful of things about this
recording that emit new-agey warning signals. The cover kinda screams
ECM, 1978, the title along with the track names (eight of Neptunes
moons) and, on a superficial level, even the music. But at least that
last bit is misleading. Merrell sources short-wave emissions from the
electro-magnetosphere, makes minimal adjustments or enhancements,
mostly involving loops and reverb, and presents the results as thick,
sometimes smooth, sometimes gnarly slabs of hum n static. If, after
all is said and done, it tends more toward the tonally agreeable and
if the reverb is ladled on a tad heavily for my taste, I can see the
music having wide appeal for people who enjoy (for example) Pauline
Oliveros drone work or the long string music of Ellen Fullman.

Merrell has also worked with Francisco Lopez and you can hear a
certain affinity, particularly if you pump up the volume a few
notches. In some pieces, such as Larissa, you get toward a similar
cavernous massiveness of sonic space; Lopez may seek to place you
inside a jet engine but Merrell wants to situate you directly in line
with a solar flare. A track like this comes closest to abandoning any
traditional musical elements and is most successful, to these ears, as
a pure, heady chunk of sonics. One can easily imagine, given a strong
enough sound system, how immersive this music could be in live
performance. The following cut, Proteus, takes things a step further
by injecting some rude splats of static into the mix, creating an even
grainier, less cloying stew. Nereid, the final piece here, breaks
formation with the others, initially discarding the drone-wash and
utilizing a series of semi-regular pulses, dusted with static and
navigating between sine-like tones at various aural distances though
eventually it too settles into the ether. Its an intriguing tack,
recalling (of all things) recordings like Hancock's Sextant, pared and
reduced but retaining a vestige of funk.

As mentioned above, Neptune is likely to be right up the alley for
those already attuned with Oliveros and associated musicians, less so
for the noisier inclined.

— Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen, August, 2006

Shortwave radio sounds have been attractive to electronic music
composers since John Cage twiddled the dials for his Imaginary
Landscapes and Karlheinz Stockhausen sought alien communication in the
music of the spheres. More recently, John Duncan has used shortwave
sounds extensively in his recent experimental work. The range of
sounds that come from the deep unknown connects musicians with
something larger than themselves, something from Out There (like
Mulders Truth). Connecticut composer Todd Merrell has used shortwaves
in his work for many years, and his spirit on Neptune is closer to
Duncan than Stockhausen, especially to Duncan's more ambient works like
Phantom Broadcast.

Neptune is the second album released in the Australian label Dreamland
Recordings projected set of nine Planetary Series albums. Each of the
eight tracks (corresponding to Neptunes named satellites) was composed
in real-time, solo, with no overdubs or post-production. Merrell used
only a short wave receiver, a loop sampler, a couple of effects and a
mixer. Several tracks are deep ambient drones that wouldnt be out of
place on Oophois Umbra label, but on Thalassa and Galatea the voices
from the original source transmissions are still in evidence, albeit
heavily processed. Proteus is the noisiest piece, with a continuous
buzzing underlying the sustained drones. The longest track, Nereid,
has a repeating rhythmic ostinato with slow melodic lines over a
low-fidelity background noise like tape hiss.

Merrell succeeds in getting a variety of sounds from his material,
with each track like a short vignette of messages from deep space. At
low volumes, Neptune is suitable for late-night drifting, but there is
a lot of detail for headphone listeners.

— Caleb Deupree, Ambient Visions, December, 2006

Taking his inspiration from the isolationist music of Thomas Koner
or the more recent works of Biosphere, Merrell crafts a dark, empty
space in which nothing seems to live. Like a cold, glacier wind
coming out of your speakers, with small events happening, but that
never work their way upfront. Everything seems to be happening in a
low key mode. Silent and tranquil, but ever so dark that 'new age'
isn't a term that even comes closely to this. Great stuff...

They take shortwave radios and use a variety of effects to transform
the signals they pull out of the air into music. But that's like
saying Rachmaninoff wrote music for orchestras. Playing at Real Art
Ways on Saturday night, they looked like — and sometimes
sounded like — spies in a submarine, engineering the next
missile crisis. No sooner would a rhythm become familiar than one of
them would tear it down with a piercing squawk or an eruption of
bass. Baker's chiming guitar offered respite from the storm,
multiplying upon itself in minimalist phrases until these, too, were
almost too much to bear; he then deftly pulled the plug, letting the
listener fall back onto a cushion of ambient white noise. And
through it all, echoes of human voices and glimpses of broadcast
music wove in and out like tentative reminders that we, indeed, are
the stuff their music is made of. Brilliant.

— Hartford Advocate

Todd Merrell is an expert at subtlety. His sounds do not beg for attention,
rather they simmer in the background and slowly work their way into the
psyche.

— Zac Keiller, Dreamland Recordings

Quite enjoyable detailed obscure spaces in there.

— Francisco Lopez

Merrell and Jordan construct and traverse a
fascinating soundscape — choral undulations,
mechanical grindings, distant swoops and plunges,
waves of white noise. As one vein is exhausted, they
find another to mine, moving the piece along at just
the right moment and settling momentarily, at just the
right place.

— Lou Mallozzi, P-Form Magazine

Thanks to the composers' sensitivity to sonic
nuances, they remind us that this old and still
ubiquitous technology — this radiophonic nowhere — can
be a pleasant place to travel.